I’m thrilled to have a wise and thoughtful colleague blogging now on issues of arts and brand and strategy. Neill Archer Roan has shown up a few times in this weblog (like here and here). But now instead of quoting what I heard him say, I can point to his words directly…and subscribe to them, myself.
A case in point is Neill’s wonderful work in audience analysis for arts organizations, where he’s discovering some astounding underlying dynamics in purchase behaviors. One of the biggies, so far ignored by most consultants and arts marketers, is ”churn” — the tidal force beneath the generic attendance numbers we all watch so closely.
Through his number crunching, Neill has noticed that even organizations that have a seemingly stable attendance (the same numbers every year) are actually churning through audience at an alarming rate. It’s as if more than half the audience is leaving every year, masked by the new folks coming in to take their place (half of whom will not come back).
Says Neill:
In the course of our work, our client organizations have discovered that their marketing departments have effectively acquired new accounts (some in the range of 60% to 70% of audiences as new or re-acquired) while the rest of the organization — most of which has held itself harmless in this dynamic — has failed to retain the audience that marketing has acquired.
If one uses the product-adoption continuum model (consumers move from awareness to consideration to choice to repeat), the consumption cycle is breaking down in the choice to repeat phase. In most product, service, or experience categories, marketing analysts would surmise that the numbers signal troubling dissatisfaction with the product (in our case, the experience) on the consumer’s part. In bottom line terms: their experience doesn’t meet their expectations.
The numbers suggest that the marketing departments are doing astounding work getting new bodies through the door — so perhaps we should stop glaring at them. Acquisition isn’t the problem. Retention is. Audiences aren’t finding value in what they experience, or not experiencing the value they came for. And that’s a very different ball game. Says Neill again:
We believe that organizations must transform their focus from one that is tactical to one that is strategic and inquisitive. They must be willing to engage in muscular conversations about how programmatic and audience development agendas meet audience and community needs, and whether, in fact, programs are meeting audience expectations.
Artistic quality must stop being a conversation-ender and start being a conversation-starter. Marketing processes and priorities must be equally focused on revealing what’s happening as well as on selling. Strategies should emerge from actual audience behavior, not from assumptions about what’s worked in the past, or from the latest association workshop’s menu of “silver bullets.”
Glad to have him on-line.
HOW OUTRAGOUS and WONDERFUL to hear someone address this issue from a retention standpoint!!!
I was in a meeting with an arts orginization in another part of the state this month where I came to address attendence at our areas respective shows and why it seems so difficult to get other artists to attend each others events? I was met with “we are all overloaded and frankly we just dont want to” with a few encouraging exceptions from artists who have lived in larger cities and have seen a more stable market and what can be done.
Live Music, Interactive questions and answers, news media presence, I know you dont want this to turn into a bulleted list, but what has happened at exhibitions you’ve attended in the past that created a ‘stickiness’ (to borrow from The Tipping Point) leaving you with the idea that you had a “good night” and would be interested in coming back to another exhibition? Is it impressions that the GALLERY leaves you with, or impressions the ARTIST leaves you with? Both? Can we talk about specifics?
Keep in mind, we dont have agents in this neck of the woods. Perhaps not in this state! I’m going to explore your links and see if theres any juicy info there. Thanks for broaching this topic!